Patrick Kingsley
speaker
102 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Patrick Kingsley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Several mini crises aside, it has gone roughly to plan. And that plan was to exchange 33 hostages held in Gaza by Hamas and its allies for roughly 1,500 Palestinian prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails. Just to recap... At the start of the war, Hamas and its allies raided Israel, captured roughly 250 hostages, both dead and alive, brought them back to Gaza.
Some of them were exchanged in a previous hostage for prisoner deal in late 2023. A handful have been rescued in Israeli military camps. operations but roughly 100 were still in captivity in january when this ceasefire was sealed and the deal allows for roughly a third of them most of them alive but some of them dead to be swapped for
Palestinian prisoners who variously had been jailed 20 years ago for their role in terrorist attacks on Israelis, but also hundreds of Palestinians who had been arrested without charge inside Gaza by the Israeli military and held in difficult conditions inside the Israeli prison archipelago. And as I say, the broad picture is that those have mostly... gone as they were expected to.
But there have been some immensely traumatic scenes for both Israelis and Palestinians that have led to constant fears that this initial ceasefire was about to collapse. Tell us about those. Well, every Saturday, the choreography would go like this. The hostages would be released from Gaza and then, once they were free, the prisoners would be released from Israel.
But the spectacles of both releases drew immense pain and anger on both sides. When the three or four hostages that were supposed to be released that day were freed, they were put up on stage in front of cheering crowds to bombastic music, often set against banners that attacked Israel and sought to humiliate the Israeli military.
The hostages themselves often looked extremely gaunt, malnourished, starved, which sent shockwaves through Israeli society. And sometimes they would be interviewed on stage, seemingly against their will, asked humiliating questions about their time in captivity or asked to send messages to the Israeli political leadership.
On the Palestinian side, there were also some uncomfortable scenes of prisoners emerging from Israeli prisons in very bad shape. Some of them were forced to wear clothes that said words to the effect of, we will never forgive, we will never forget, a reference to the crimes that they were jailed for 20 years ago.
And so there was anger among both societies about the way that these releases were being conducted. And that culminated in perhaps the most unsettling and disturbing hostage release ceremony of the lot last week, when the bodies of three Israeli civilians from the same family, two very young boys,
Ariel Bibas and his brother, Kafir Bibas, four years old and eight months old respectively at the time of their capture in October 2023, and their mother, Shiri Bibas, a 32-year-old accountant. Those bodies were supposed to be released back to Israel last Thursday, and they were handed over to members of the Red Cross
in front of big crowds of Palestinians and against the visual backdrop of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, looking like a vampire dripping with blood.
Exactly. The Hamas claim was that these two very young children and their mother were killed in Israeli airstrikes and that Netanyahu and the Israeli military was to blame for their deaths along with the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
And those images of a vampiric Netanyahu seem to be stuck to not only the banner on the stage that was at the center of this handing over ceremony, but also on the coffins themselves. And this was seen in Israel as enormously disrespectful, ghoulish, essentially. And that impression was taken to the nth degree once the bodies were examined back in Israel.
The Israeli military said that the two boys were not killed in Israeli airstrikes and that an autopsy had revealed that they were killed by militants inside Gaza after their capture. And then they revealed something even more shocking. that the body of their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not actually her body at all.
It was the body of someone else completely, perhaps a Palestinian woman, who had been sent back either by mistake or by design to Israel. And this was a shocking piece of news for the Israeli public. This family had been one of the main emblems of Israeli trauma on October the 7th.
And so to see the spectacle of these two young children and their mother being returned in this way, and then on top of that to learn that the mother, Shiri, was in fact still in Gaza, was an immensely triggering and re-traumatizing event.
It was, ultimately. Hamas said it searched again in the place where the Bibas family was buried alongside Palestinians killed during Israeli airstrikes at some point in the course of the war. And they quickly found the right body and returned it back to Israel. And that family was finally able to have some degree of closure.
But the fury of the Israeli government did not die down once Shiri Bebas's body was returned. The whole incident contributed to the Israeli decision to delay the release of the prisoners who were meant to be exchanged for the Bebas's bodies.
I think there's a few different reasons. In part, it's seen as a counterpoint to the way that Palestinian detainees and prisoners are being released in what Palestinians see as a very humiliating manner. But it's also a means of projecting power and authority. They want to remind both the Palestinians of Gaza and the people of Israel that despite 16 months of war that was meant to force them
From power in Gaza, they are very much still in charge.
It's hard to know exactly what level of authority or capacity they have in Gaza because we're not allowed in. The Israeli government is still not letting journalists into Gaza. However, it does seem from these videos and what reporting we are able to do that they are still the dominant force in Gaza. And if they want to organize a dramatic rally to send off the bodies of journalists
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